Harassment by trans activists of philosopher Kathleen Stock and others continues in the UK

A transgender lecturer orchestrated a smear campaign against academics across the UK in which universities were described as dangerous and accused of “hate crime” if they refused to accept activists’ views that biological males can be women, it can be revealed.

Natacha Kennedy, a researcher at Goldsmiths University of London who is also understood to work there under the name Mark Hellen, faces accusations of a “ludicrous” assault on academic freedom after she invited thousands of members of a closed Facebook group to draw up and circulate a list shaming academics who disagreed with campaigners’ theories on gender.

The online forum, seen by The Times, also revealed that members plotted to accuse non-compliant professors of hate crime to try to have them ousted from their jobs. Reading, Sussex, Bristol, Warwick and Oxford universities were among those deemed to have “unsafe” departments because they employed academics who had publicly disputed the belief that “transwomen are women” or questioned the potential impact of proposed changes to gender laws on women and children....

Members of the group claimed that the philosophy department of the University of Sussex was “clearly an unsafe environment” because of the presence of Kathleen Stock, a professor who has argued against redefining the category of woman and lesbian to include men.

“File a hate crime report against her, and then the chairman and vice-chair,” advised one. “Drag them over the f***ing coals"....

Professor Stock said: “What would make a philosophy department unsafe is if its academics weren’t allowed to challenge currently popular beliefs or ideologies for fear of offending. Deliberately plotting to have my department lose students, or to have me dismissed, through covert means, is surprising behaviour from a fellow academic...."

Last month Brown University, the Ivy League institution in Rhode Island, was accused of cowardice by leading academics in the US after it caved into pressure on social media to pull a piece of research from its website that had concluded that social contagion could be a reason why clusters of young people were identifying as trans.

Professor Stock said: “It is head-scratchingly bizarre how so many public organisations, many of them ostensibly progressive, have capitulated to passive-aggressive, emotionally blackmailing, and sometimes even outright threatening behaviour from trans activists, often online.”